Hiya,

Of course all inputs are different! But that doesn't make you stupid.

It sounds like it's impedance matching problems going on rather than actual level differences. It's a very complex subject, but in general the input impedance wants to be substantially higher than the thing that's being plugged into it. An normal Mike is 600 ohms, and wants to be plugged into something in the region of 10,000 ohms. An electric guitar will be several thousand ohms and will want to be plugged into several million.

An IPod is slightly different. It wants to drive a pair headphones, generally between eight and 400 ohms, but it's putting lots and lots of actual power into doing it.

One thing some people seem to do wrong is to assume that the connector type is the defining thing; if you cut the plug off and put a different on one it will all work fine. This isn't the case, an input needs to be matched. Most desks will have mike inputs shared with line inputs on each channel. The mike input will want to see something of about 600 ohms, and very low voltage (Millivolts) a line input will want to see something around 10,000 ohms and a voltage around 1 volt.

A DI box will match a line signal, or a guitar signal - around 10,000 ohms, but only millivolts - to a mike input. It's one of the most useful things you can have to bring levels slightly closer to each other.

It sounds like you're doing the right thing in setting up the mixer. Start by Pfl-ing each channel to get it to the right level, then bring the fader (sorry, not slider!) up to zero and everything should be pretty much balanced. If you find that you can't get the fiddle and radio mike up, then turn the gain on everything else down. Some people get terribly fretful about running a system at true unity gain, but it's really not that important!

Sorry about a slightly incoherent sunday morning essay. Hopefully someone else will sya it all much better!

Cheers,

QTWF